Love Is War in Among Us
"Among Us?" Shinomiya repeated the name.
Fujiwara couldn't nod her head hard enough. "Yeah, yeah! You've heard of it, right?" She said, practically bouncing on the heels of her feet.
Having not a clue, Shinomiya cast her gaze over to the president's desk, desperately hoping her boyfriend (holy crap, it still felt so good to say that!) would throw her a lifeline.
Picking up on her signal, Shirogane was still a bit slow to lower his pen from his papers, not entirely confident in his answer either. "Among Us. It's that online game that's popular in America, right?"
"It's huge in America." Ishigami said simply from the couch in the council room's center, not even looking up from his handheld as he spoke. Iino was giving him the death glare from the couch opposite his, on the other side of the table, though he was too used to it to even be phased at this point. He figured the only reason she didn't actually say anything and try to take his game away was because she'd lectured him on his blatant disregard of school rules so many times already that she knew doing it again wouldn't make any difference. Everyone else in the room suspected a very different reason, but it wasn't their place to say. "Every gaming Youtuber I watch basically has ten videos minimum dedicated to it and it's been slowly oozing its way into Japan."
"Ah. That explains that then." Shirogane commented, mostly to himself. If the game was already big overseas, it made sense why his dad was jumping on the fad as soon as it was starting to crop up here, having told his two children that 500 Million Yen in Debt was going to have a rare gameplay stream with his subscribers, despite his channel mostly revolving around stories and giving advice. And the game in question had been Among Us. Shirogane had to assume it was relatively cheap too. His father may be better off financially than before but he was nearly as thrifty as his son and certainly more interested in whittling down that 500 million as much as he possibly could.
Fujiwara whipped out her phone. "It's been available on the app store for a while now. If everyone downloads it, we can all play together!"
Iino gave a somewhat sickly look over to her upperclassman, her stomach clearly in a bit of a twist. "F-Fujiwara. You know video games are against school rules. We're on the student council. We need to be the ones setting the example. Do you really want to be in the same category as this guy?" Her expression straightened out when she set a strict glare back on Ishigami.
"Sure, I'm game. Let's play." He said without an ounce of hesitation, possibly as a deliberate attempt to get Iino's blood boiling as he didn't even acknowledge her barb (it worked). "It's something that's been on my radar for a while now but I never bothered with because I've heard it can be pretty annoying to deal with randos in the public lobbies. Private games are the best for this kind of thing."
"I knew I could count on the council's resident neet! Thanks, Ishigami!" Fujiwara gave him a thumbs up with a wink.
"You know I'm on your side, right?"
Immediately back to tuning him out, Fujiwara quickly turned to the person she knew she'd have to convince the most if she was going to pull this off.
"Miko! Remember your training before in avoiding getting angry? We broke some rules as minor as this and it ended up being for the better, right? We took a bunch of pics that Kaguya was able to put into her phone after her old one broke. You created physical memories of your time on the student council, didn't you?"
"Well…I guess that's true…" The poor girl awkwardly played with her pigtails, attempting to keep her convictions against the increasing pressure.
"And it's an app, so if the game goes well here we can play whenever we want together outside of school, even when we're apart! Won't that be fun?"
"It…it does sound like it…"
"She just wants to play games in school." Was the singular thought shared by all others in the room.
Unable to withstand her senpai's pleas (manipulations) any longer, Iino finally resigned herself to her fate and started looking up the app to download it.
"I'm guessing you're bringing this up now because we don't have to organize the exchange party with the French sister school this year." Shirogane regained Fujiwara's attention from the desk. This time last year they'd barely had a chance to breathe with how busy they were, but word up on high from the principal had gifted them with a mercy and it'd be the other school handling everything this time. All they had to worry about was not making fools out of themselves while ballroom dancing.
"Of course! I've been waiting weeks to ask! Never underestimate a secretary's ability to study a schedule. This is the perfect time for something like this."
"Even with that being the case it's not like we have nothing on our plate. We are still the Student Council, after all." Shinomiya reminded her.
"She does have a point." Shirogane concurred. "It is only four months left until the end of the semester. The more time we waste now the more we're going to be backed up later."
"Augh! You're only agreeing with her because she's your girlfriend! You have a bias!" Fujiwara accused him.
"Nonsense. While it's true we're dating I am first and foremost the Student Council President. I need to be able to keep my private and professional lives separate, and in this case I believe madam Vice-President brings up a good argument." Shirogane countered, his fan lightly flittering his hair as his mannerisms stayed calm and collected.
"You have my thanks, President." Shinomiya said with a soft bow, showing her gratitude in a proper way that fit her position, like an iron wall Fujiwara was hurtling towards that showed no sign of relenting. It made her what to scream, pull her own hair, and smack her head against the desk. While it was true she'd been annoyed at first by how lovey-dovey the two had been after Shinomiya finally let their relationship become public, being the absolute models of professionalism felt wrong too! They were a boy and girl dating in high school! At least blush a little since she brought up the subject! But no. Outward appearance, with those simple stone faces, she may as well have just brought the weekly budget. Hell, that might have gotten more of a reaction. On the matter of love, these two seems indestructible.
…...Buuuuuuuuuuuut on the inside…
"Holy crap, it feels great to have people call Shinomiya my girlfriend!"
"The President's talking about how we're dating! We're really dating and we're doing it out in the open! AAAAAA!"
"For someone who calls herself the Love Detective you'd think she'd be better at picking up on these things." Ishigami commented casually to Iino, causing the poor auditor to develop a bead of sweat running down her temple. She respected Fujiwara too much to want to say anything, but even just glancing up from her phone as she struggled with the app store it was apparently much more obvious to her what was going on underneath the president and vice-president's facades than it was to Fujiwara, who could only continue to attack things from a begging position.
"Come on! Kei played it with me and Moeha and she said it was super fun!"
The self-created breeze from Shirogane's fan slowed, the words sparking the memory. "Oh yeah, I think I remember that actually." He said, recalling seeing Fujiwara's Twitter feed on the night his sister spent over her house and how excited they were to play. "Come to think of it, that was also the night of…"
"President…I love you."
"I really,"
"really,"
"really,"
"love you."
"….."
"AMONG US MIGHT BE THE GREATEST GAME IN THE WORLD!" His brain screamed as it connected two tangentially related dots across a great distance.
Shirogane snapped the fan closed. "I'm in."
"What?!" Shinomiya's expression finally cracked in her bafflement.
"Really?!" Fujiwara cheered.
Shirogane stared at his secretary with the most serious face she'd ever seen on him and that was saying something. "I always repay my debts."
"Eh?" Fujiwara's head cocked to the side with a blank smile. She had won but didn't quite understand why.
Suffice to say, Shinomiya was outvoted.
With all in agreement (and Fujiwara's pleading gaze into her eyes making Shinomiya finally give in), the players situated themselves across the room, where no one other than themselves would be able to have a direct line of sight to their personal screen. The president kept his rear seated behind his desk. Fujiwara and Iino on one couch at the furthest ends from each other. Shinomiya mirrored her junior's position on the opposite couch, while Ishigami actually volunteered to sit on the floor, back to the cabinet, so that their newly called 6th player could take his seat on the couch next to her.
"I'm sorry it was such a last minute request." Shinomiya gave her sincere apology to Hakasaka.
"Hm?" The former servant of her house glanced back up from the screne, having been given Kaguya's phone so that she could find the app for her. "Oh, trust me, in comparison to all the running around and bizarre requests I used to do, being asked if I want to play a game isn't exactly an annoyance." She assured her, much to Shinomiya's relief. "Besides, I like this game."
"Oh, you've played it before?"
"Yeah, Hinokuchi and Suruga introduced it to me and were insistent I download it so that we could play during our breaks during the day. It was fun but we never really had time to play it outside of school because of my "part-time" job."
"Right…sorry…" Shinomiya apologized again, guilt taking a firm hold of her throat, even though Hakasaka's words had been spoken with truthfully no malice. Quite honestly she was quite thrilled to have been asked to come here. Her former mistress was about as analog as it gets and they never even had the time to play a game of chess before, so how was she supposed to talk her into downloading apps meant solely for fun and playing, even after she was forced to get a phone capable of such?
"Actually, that reminds me," Hayakasa said as a thought popped into her head. "Fujiwara, I thought your father forbade you from video games. How is it that you have even been able to play this?"
In response, Fujiwara could only awkwardly poke her fingers together as she looked away in shame.
"I see. So that's why you wanted to play with us here so badly." Shinomiya pieced together things from there and allowed Fujiwara to say no more, even regaining some sympathy for her old friend. The game was on her phone so it was easy enough to hide and every time she played it had probably been done in secret so she wouldn't get caught by her very old-fashioned father. Half the reason she joined the tabletop game club was because it was a form of fun he wouldn't disapprove of. This might be one of the few or even only times she'd be getting to play more openly.
"Alright everyone, listen up!" Fujiwara threw her dramatic voice on, casting aside her prior downness and getting into character. "We are a crew of daring explorers, travelling across the cosmos to discover that which has never been seen before. Our ship has come under dire need of repair and we all have been given a list of tasks to compete. Wires. O2. And so on. However! There is an imposter among us!"
"Why are you pointing at me?" Ishigami naturally asked when her theatrically inclined finger landed upon him.
She ignored his words and kept going. "They'll stop at nothing to prevent the crew from continuing their journey. As such, the crewmates win if they either successfully complete all the tasks or vote out the imposter, while the imposter wins if they can get the crewmates down to an equal number as imposters, by vote or by murder, or by sabotaging something critical that doesn't get repaired in time."
While they weren't going to use an accessories ("They're called hats!"), Fujiwara insisted everyone customize their character at least a little by picking a color, with her naturally rushing to get the one she wanted first. Within a minute and everyone made their choice.
Fujiwara: Pink
Shinomiya: Red
Shirogane: Dark blue
Ishigami: Black
Iino: Brown
Hayakasa: Yellow
Shirogane stared down at the little red figure standing among the other similar shapes in the lobby.
"President…" Shinomiya spoke softly from within the suit that matched her eyes, it hugging every part of her body.
"Cute." Shirogane kept his features straight but his delusions made his face feel just a touch warmer.
Shinomiya…was a bit less subtle, at least to Hayakasa, whom did her best to avoid looking at her right now and her perverse open-mouth stare. She knew her former mistress well enough to know exactly whose dead-eyed glare she was imagining leering at her from inside the suit of that little blue man.
"Set the imposters to 1 since we only have six people." Ishigami told Fujiwara, whom was hosting. "We can increase it once the new players get more used to the game."
"Sounds good! Now, everybody ready?!"
She asked but didn't wait much time for an answer. The lobby faded into blackness, the icon of a crewmate appearing, telling them to "SHHHHHHH!" before all their characters appeared again in a line-up.
CREWMATE
There is 1 imposter among us
"Oh. We'll also be playing on the Skeld map, since it's very newbie-friendly." Fujiwara added as everything went back to black.
"And if you die, don't say anything."
"Why are you looking at me when you say that, Ishigami?!"
The blackness faded away from the screen, revealing a large room with five sets of tables. Given the design of the floor and the food, this was probably a mess hall or cafeteria or the like.
Shinomiya felt slightly intimidated at first, watching all the other crewmembers on the screen silently dart off in various directions while she still struggled with figuring out how to move her own. "I miss having buttons." She lamented to herself as she finally got the little red her to follow her finger. She enjoyed having a Smartphone more than she initially thought she would but there was still something securing about having something to input commands on that was always there and had what they did marked clearly on them.
Still moving only a bit at a time, she felt lost on what to do or even where to go until she finally spotted the yellow arrow in the corner, pointing her leftwards. Assuming the likely answer and that this was part of the game, Shinomiya followed its direction.
Making her way down the hall (with great but thankfully decreasing effort), she made a left upon coming to a large engine at its end, emerging at a four-way intersection. The arrow still pointing left, that's the way she turned, entering a room with a large cylinder decorated with long blue lights.
The arrow disappeared, where it'd been now being a panel on the device that was outlined yellow. Walking up, Shinomiya gave it a tap of her finger.
A 9x9 grid popped up on the screen, taking up most of the space. The left-most center square blinked blue. Clicking it once in response, the same square blinked again, and following it so too did the square at the far-right bottom.
"I see. So this is just a simple memory game." Shinomiya commented to herself, hitting the buttons in the same order and, as before, the pattern repeated, with a new prompt at the end. She didn't really understand how this help with spaceship repair, not that she was any kind of expert on the subject. But still, this just seemed somewhat-
It came as a small startling moment, at first making think she'd somehow done something wrong; the image of half a crewmate filling up her screen and that of everyone else. A body had just been reported and thus they all were being pulled into a meeting.
"I found her in storage, just outside the hallway leading to lights." Ishigami was the first to break the silence, as he was one to call it in.
The "her" in question was no difficult to figure out, even without seeing who was tinted out on the screen. Shinomiya looked to her left, where Hayakasa sat, wearing the mask of silence (though given her closed eyes, it may as well be the mask of shame for being killed first).
"I can confirm that Ishigami just walked up on the body and it was already dead on the ground, since I came out of admin with him." Shirogane added his input. "Did anybody else see Hayakasa before she died after we left the main center area? Does anybody have an alibi for where they are right now?"
The stories went as follows:
Shinomiya tried to describe the memory game best as she could, Fujiwara and Ishigami verifying that it was called "Simon Says". She was in the middle left, between the two engine rooms.
Iino had been connecting wires when the body was reported but she had difficulty saying where the exact room was other than it was the lower half of the map.
Fujiwara had immediately gone to Weapons (upper right) to play asteroids (since it was her favorite task to do), then wires in Navigation (middle right, exact opposite side of the map as Shinomiya), then the navigation task in the same room, and finally shields in Shields, lower right. It was…a hell of a stream that'd flowed out of her mouth to describe her path during the round.
Hayakasa…was dead, and naturally couldn't say anything.
"Alright. So we've got three main suspects." Shirogane tapped his fans to his chin with a smile, actually getting into it a little. Hours upon hours pouring over books to prepare for academic challenges but he honestly very rarely got to enjoy a little deduction puzzle. "I know it's not me and Ishigami didn't have enough time away from me to have pulled off a kill and come back."
"Fujiwara and Ishigami know enough about this game already to lie about what they were doing and make it sound convincing. However, President cleared Ishigami and there's only one imposter, so he'd have no reason to lie and cover for him." Shinomiya's private thoughts listed themselves out, unknowingly mirroring Shirogane's own. "I know I didn't kill Hayakasa, so that just leaves Iino and Fujiwara."
"It's certainly possible it's Shinomiya but she has no experience with this game. It's her first time playing and both Fujiwara and Ishigami, one a suspect and the other I know to be innocent, said what she described was an actual task in the game. So, it has to be either Fujiwara or Iino."
"Fujiwara had an entire detailed route she could give while Iino barely had anything, which does make sense given their relative experience with the game. If Fujiwara was the killer, and given she was the one to bring up the game in the first place, it'd be reasonable for her to have a script prepared."
"However, before the game even started one of the tasks that was talked about for the game was wires. Everyone else did one task at a time as they worked their way through the map, while Iino is at the bottom and can only name that one task."
"Iino's lack of a description could also be because she doesn't actually know where wires would be. If she was too specific she'd risk outing herself."
"This evidence is circumstantial at best. But…"
"We don't have to vote right now, since we're not certain. But…"
"The most likely person to be the killer is…!"
"Alright, so, everyone sees their own name in red, right?" Fujiwara asked.
Everyone replied at the same time.
Shinomiya: "No."
Shirogane: "No."
Iino: "Yes."
Ishigami: "No."
Fujiwara pointed at Iino. "She's the imposter."
"THAT IS SO CHEAP!" Ishigami blurted without hesitation.
In the end, when the timer ran out it was Iino's character who was seen being ejected out into space, three votes to two.
"You actually voted for yourself." Ishigami stated dryly to the heavily red-faced Iino, somewhat trying to hide herself behind her bangs. "If you'd voted Fujiwara like Prez and I did you would have lasted another round."
It was evident she'd already come to the same conclusion, though with the [Defeat] that played across her screen and hers alone in contrast to the [Victory] of everyone else, it was obviously a bit too late to take it back. "W-well…it wouldn't have made any difference, anyway." She chose to double-down instead. "If everyone already knows it's me then there'd be nothing I could do. Everyone would be watching me and the only victory I could get would be out of pity."
"It's the principal of the thing. You need to punish cheaters, even when they cheat in a way that helps you win the game." He said, casting a tired-eyed stare at Fujiwara, who could only rub the back of her head with a nervous laugh. This was far from the first time she'd done something like this.
Shinomiya watched as Hayakasa gave Iino a few "there-there" pats on the head, apparently no hard feelings over being killed after watching a humiliation like that. She did feel somewhat bad about voting Iino out, given she did agree Fujiwara had played a bit unfairly. But she was also in agreement with Iino's logic. Even if she had lasted into the next round the game was basically already over for her. Moving on to the next game would have been the most overall merciful thing to do.
Shirogane could only rub the space between his eyes.
This might be a long session.
Author's notes: I binged through the entirety of Kaguya-Sama: Love is War over a week, both the anime and manga. I may come back to this, I may not, but regardless I just had the itch to write something involving these really fun characters.
By the way, none of this is me dumping on Fujiwara. I kind of love that I don't think there's been a single game she's played against her fellow student council members where she didn't cheat or play dirty in some way. I think the only one was the Life game her club had made up that she was having the council help her test.